Not long after baby Jeffrey Baldwin was
placed in the care of the grandparents who would ultimately starve
him to death, a children’s aid society worker looked at files on the
couple’s record of child abuse, a coroner’s inquest heard Thursday.

TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Jeffrey Baldwin died in November 2002,
weighing just 21 pounds, about the same as he did on his first
birthday.

By:Allison JonesThe Canadian Press,Published on Fri Oct 11 2013

Not long after baby
Jeffrey Baldwin was placed in the care of the grandparents
who would ultimately starve him to death, a children’s aid
society worker looked at files on the couple’s record of child
abuse, a coroner’s inquest heard Thursday.

But that information was not passed on to the workers
directly involved in Jeffrey’s care and the grandparents’
shocking history didn’t come to light at large until after the
5-year-old boy died in 2002.

When he died, Jeffrey was a skeletal 21 pounds — about what
he weighed when he was first sent to his grandparents four years
earlier.

The missed opportunity in October 1998 was one of several the
inquest heard about that could have exposed Elva Bottineau and
Norman Kidman’s sordid past and prompted children’s aid to
snatch Jeffrey and his three siblings out of their care.
Bottineau and Kidman are serving life sentences for
second-degree murder

The Catholic Children’s Aid Society had, in its own files,
records of Bottineau abusing her first child and of Kidman
beating Bottineau’s next two children from a previous
relationship, sending them to hospital.

There were records of the CCAS supervising Bottineau and
Kidman’s care of the three daughters they had together. There
were records of abuse investigations in the following years,
including allegations made about some children Bottineau cared
for as a “foster day mom.”

The Catholic Children’s Aid Society sent Jeffrey and two of
his siblings (the York Children’s Aid Society managed the file
of Jeffrey’s youngest sibling) to live with their grandparents
when these files were a records search away.

The inquest heard Thursday from CCAS manager Louise Galego
that common practice was to check internal records of the
parents who were the subject of an investigation, not
necessarily the grandparents as alternate caregivers.

However, Galego said, a records search for Jeffrey’s mother,
Yvonne Kidman, should have turned up the records of the
supervision order she and her sisters were under when they were
young. The file should “conceivably” have turned up, Galego
said, but she couldn’t say for sure if a search was ever done or
not.

Those records would have noted that Yvonne Kidman and her
sisters were under a supervision order after Bottineau’s two
older children were removed from the home following the severe
beating by Norman Kidman.

One of those two children reported later that Bottineau and
Kidman abused and neglected her and her brother, sometimes
locking them in dog crates.

As an adult, she called the Catholic Children’s Aid Society
requesting old files about her, the inquest heard. That was just
months after Jeffrey had been placed in Bottineau and Kidman’s
home.

The worker in the adoption department found those old records
and mailed out copies, but workers in the child protection
department, who were dealing directly with the
Bottineau-Kidman-Baldwin family, were never told, the inquest
heard.

The CCAS has implemented many changes since Jeffrey’s death,
including various iterations of record-keeping systems, Galego
testified. But gaps still remain, she said.

It is extremely disappointing to see that the Catholic
Children's Aid Society behaving in the same fashion as the other 47
members of Ontario's private corporations who behave like a criminal
cartel to abuse the abused by fabricating evidence and never ever
admitting a mistake. The scam goes like this. When ONE CAS is
exposed, the other 47 say, that's not us, it was an isolated
example. No, most of the time, every single CAS engages in
fabrication of evidence as their entire system is motivated by
FUNDING. It costs Ontario around One Billion Dollars in direct
operating costs and many more billions in the flow on Criminal
Costs, Police Costs, Legal Aid Costs, Subsidized Housing, destroyed
employment, welfare that add up to billions more in costs most of
this wasted economic resource could be avoided by Disbanding the CAS
and replacing it with a Government Department of Child Protection.
StopCAS.CA